Original scientific paper
Variants of Victoriana in the Postmodern English Novel
Tatjana Jukić
Abstract
John Fowles's The French Lieutenantís Woman is the first English postmodemist novel to address the issue of its own Victorian heritage. It offers a new perspective of the issues commonly associated with the postmodemist concept of historicism. My aim is to analyse the interaction between Fowles's portrayal of the Victorian era and the Victorians as seen by other contemporary novelists. Thus the “second wave" of the postmodem English nove] (Bames, Ackroyd) casts aside the documentary and ontological quality of Fowles's historiographic archaeology, stressing metatext and metafictíon. The “neo-Victorian” fiction of the Nineties (women novelists: Byatt, Tennant, Colegate) refrains both from Fowles`s ';restoration and Aclcroyd's deconstruction of the Victorians. Here, history functions as the delightful source for a possible world, recognized as fiction/romance and enjoyed as such.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
120821
URI
Publication date:
22.11.1995.
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